Getting to Know Dine Out Vancouver Festival 2025
Launched in 2002, Dine Out Vancouver Festival began as a creative way to encourage diners to support restaurants post-holidays. Since then, it has grown to become the biggest food and drink festival in Canada, encompassing affordable prix fixe menus and exciting food and drink events.
Dine Out Vancouver Festival returns January 22 to February 9, 2025, with nearly three weeks to take advantage of everything the city’s diverse culinary and drink scene has to offer.
Photo: The Boathouse
When Dine Out Vancouver began, 57 restaurants participated, offering well-priced multicourse menus. For the 2025 edition, over 400 restaurants will take part, including some establishments who make up the city’s prestigious MICHELIN Guide. Restaurants and their menus will be announced on the Dine Out Vancouver website on January 15, so make sure to mark your calendars for this grand reveal.
Each restaurant offers set menus (often with choices for each of the courses) for a fixed price. With three price ranges ($20-$35, $35-$50, and $50-$65), you can choose the price point that works for your budget, as well as whether you want to enjoy a more casual, midrange, or upscale dining experience. Both lunch and dinners options are also available.
Restaurants represent a range of different cuisines, including Italian, Mexican, West Coast, and Japanese. Establishments are located all across Vancouver in its many unique neighbourhoods, as well as other municipalities across Metro Vancouver, such as Richmond and Surrey.
Dine Out Vancouver menus are an amazing chance to appreciate the delicious strengths of the city’s dining landscape. Vancouver restaurants are renowned for their use of fresh, local, and sustainable ingredients, and their showcasing of the region’s rich multiculturalism.
Photo: Gastronomic Gastown Tour
In addition to the huge selection of prix fixe menus, Dine Out Vancouver Festival encompasses different events that allow participants to gain a deeper sense of the city’s culinary scene and its talented chefs, bartenders, and makers/suppliers. Many of the events are interactive and immersive, others highly informative—with all of them promising to be tasty and fun.
There are numerous new events this year, including a Grand Mezcal Tasting at Alimentaria Mexicana (January 23), during which chef/owner Martin Vargas will lead guests through tastings of small batch mezcals; a Chinatown Cocktail Showdown (January 31, Vancouver Chinatown Storytelling Centre) between the neighbourhood’s bars and restaurants to see who can come up with the best Lunar New Year-themed cocktail; and a Collab Dinner (February 5) featuring chefs Shane Chartrand (Top Chef Canada) and Dino Renaerts (Bon Vivant Catering) at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art.
Here are 5 more events to look forward to as part of Dine Out Vancouver Festival:
Sea Foraging (January 18-February 16, Belcarra Park) returns, with Chef Robin Kort from Swallow Tail Culinary Adventures teaching you all about how to sustainably forage for seafood like sea cucumbers and mussels.
Vancouver Foodster hosts Dine Out East Van Dumpling Fest (February 5), a self-guided tasting tour of East Vancouver, centred on dumplings.
Uno Gelato in Kitsilano guides you through Gelato 101 (January 22-February 7), which involves tastings, as well as how to make gelato and sorbetto. You’ll get a cup or cone of gelato/sorbetto as a treat, and a homemade pint to take away from the event.
Mashup Tour: Distilleries, Breweries, and Burgers (January 24-February 9), led by Canadian Craft Tours, will take you to two local breweries and one distillery, with a burger to be feasted on during the tour.
Murder mystery fans will love Dine Out with a Drag Whodunit (January 24-February 2, Water St. Cafe), presented by Vancouver Mysteries. Rhinestones Are Forever invites you to solve a mystery at a wedding, during which you’ll be served a two-course brunch or three-course dinner, watch drag performances, solve murder mystery puzzles, and potentially win prizes.
As well as these events, there are plenty of others to choose from to suit your culinary and drink interests. See HERE for the full list of events.
Dine Out Vancouver Festival 2025 is going to be an incredible kickoff to the year, with hundreds of different prix fixe meals to choose from, and events that will bring you closer to the people and ingredients that make the city such a spectacular dining and drinking destination.